V
vredensgnag
Gjest
Michael Fremer har bistått med en seanse, så det blir nok rapportert i Stereophile snart.
Bevegelsen griper om seg, og mange får en tankevekker. Et stort antall deltakere har aldri hørt et album fra første til siste spor, selv ikke klassikere som Abbey Road. Enkelte deltakere blir målløse. Noen gjenkjenner ikke album de selv har, og spør "hvilken versjon er det som spilles?"
Og må innrømme at den versjonen har de, men de har kun lyttet gjennom høyttalerne på den bærbare, eller gjennom earbuds.
Facebook-siden:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Classic-Album-Sundays/162650923792705
mp3-fil med intervju. Fra 24:30:
http://monocle.dl.groovygecko.com/m24/10400142.mp3
Dette øker forresten salget av godt hifi-utstyr, så her bør hifi-bransjen se en mulighet.
Fra Time Outs artikkel om forrige seanse i NY:
After-dark inquiry: Colleen "Cosmo" Murphy
She unveils the NYC edition of her U.K. listening session, Classic Album Sundays.
By Bruce Tantum Wed Mar 7 2012
The onetime New Yorker and current Londoner's Classic Album Sundays, her self-described "communal and audiophile listening experience," makes its Gotham debut Sunday 11on Sunday, March 11 (we're doing full dates for online-only stuff now.). The affair's inaugural LP is Bob Dylan's 1975 opus, Blood on the Tracks.
You started Classic Album Sundays a little over a year ago. What was the original impetus behind the sessions?
David Mancuso [from New York's pioneering Loft parties] has taught me, over the past 20 years, about sound, and about how important sound is in being able to really appreciate music. Especially after starting Lucky Cloud Sound System here in London with David's direction, I really started getting into the whole hi-fi world. Adam [Dewhurst, Murphy's husband] and I progressively started building up our own hi-fi as well. What we noticedwhich is what people also notice at the Loftis that you hear the music in a way that you never have before.
That can even be true of music that you think you are intimately familiar with.
Absolutely. I'd be playing a record at the Loft, and someone would come up to me and ask what the record is, and I'dtell them, and they'd say, "Oh, I have that!" They don't even recognize it as the same record. [Laughs] Anyway, sometimes we'd have people over for dinner, and after we'd eat, we'd play a whole album from beginning to end. We'd kind of jokingly call it Classic Album Sundays. Greg Wilson, the DJ, heard about them and said, "What a great idea!" He started this great blog called Living to Music (gregwilson.co.uk), which has people listen to the same album in their home, but all at the same time. There are all these guidelinesturn off your phone, go to the bathroom ahead of time, don't talkto get you to focus on the album. So I took part in the second time he did it, and the album was Dark Side of the Moon. We had the great hi-fi, and I have this great pressing of the album...and it was great! I said to Adam, "This would be such an amazing event. We should do something like this, but in public."
And you actually followed through with it.
Yeah! The first time, I contacted some friends of mine who have a pub, and they thought it was a brilliant idea, too. They gave me their function room, and somewhat crazily, we moved our whole hi-fi over there! I'm talking valve-tube amplifiers, Klipschorn speakers...so much stuff.
And expensive stuff, too. Most audiophiles wouldn't dream of doing such a thing.
True, though I guess I was kind of used to it from doing the Loft. Other than lugging the equipment around, one thing I quickly found was that this whole thing kind of combined my journalistic background, my radio background and my DJ background.
How so?
On the DJ side, I only use one turntable at Classic Album Sundays, because I want the set to be more like a living-room-style, intimate thingnot like somebody deejaying, if you know what I mean. For the first two hours, I play music that's related to the artist or the album. It could be musical contemporaries, it could be inspirations...like, for Bob Dylan, I might play Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Robert Johnsonpeople who inspired him. And I might play contemporaries like Joni Mitchell, the Band, Neil Young and people like that. And so people are already getting a feeling about the album. Then I'll have a presentationaround ten minutes or soabout the album, hopefully done in an interesting way. I do that because I've found that a lot of people who show up haven't heard the whole album, and sometimes have never heard any whole album from the artist. Even the very first one I did, which was Abbey Roadyou'd figure that everyone would have heard that whole album at some point, but at least half the people never had! And the half that had have probably never heard it on the kind of sound system that we use, or just hadn't heard it in a very long time.
So in a way, it's a new experience for everyone.
And also, the whole communal-listening thing is so rare nowadays. So much of our musical listening experience is in isolationwhich is great as well, but it's such a different experience when you're sharing it with people. When you have a room full of 50 or 60 people, intently listening, it can be pretty amazing.
I'm amazed that people nowadays have enough of an attention span to do this.
Yeah! I think the experience can kind of transform people. I had this one journalistthis young but very square journalist, not a music-head at allcome over, and he had never heard an album. Any album! So I put on Dark Side of the Moon. I got the incense, I got the candlesthe worksand we played it over this great system. He couldn't even walk or speak afterwards. He e-mailed me the next day to tell me that it took him an hour to get back to normal. That's how much it can affect you. Yes, it is challenging people's attention spans...but then again, people are happy to sit in front of a television or computer screen for hours on end, which I think shows that people do have an attention span. It's just that we're not using it for music so much.
